Phil 1.2.19

Martindale spends the book talking about poetry, but I’m listening to Kind of Blue right now and I realize that Jazz is similar. The thought leaders are in some state where they are paying attention to each other and not much else. That’s how we get a trajectory that leads to Bitches Brew.

I think this is probably a generally applicable pattern. The thing that I need to think through is how a small group of highly creative people in what could be described as an echo-ish chamber differs from mass activity in a large attractor like authoritarianism.

We want to know how many dimensions are needed to account for the similarities among poets. Fortunately, once we have correlated all of the poets with one another, a procedure called multidimensional scaling will tell us just this.* Multidimensional scaling tells us that the twenty-one French poets differ along three· main dimensions. These three dimensions account for 94 percent of the similarity matrix. (Page 114)